Marcus Fjellström

Lichtspiel Mutation 2: Alechsis

Marcus Fjellström’s music sits in the middle of a cyclone. Here, he presents us with “Lichtspiel Mutation 2: Alechsis”, a stormy record that never settles. Originally conceived as a live audiovisual piece, it’s based around characters, plotlines and footage from the 1948 film “The Amazing Mr. X”, a noir thriller directed by Bernard Vorhaus. Only, the music re-edits the original footage, meshing it up until it turns into a new, mysterious life-form all of its own.

It is, then, experimental in nature, but it has a definite structure to it, just like the screen-lit story. The old film has sat dormant in its cinematic sarcophagus, lying on its bed of dusty reels and forgotten scenes. Fjellström’s music is a musical infant that rises out of the old and decaying film. Like a modern day Frankenstein, he pieces together the music and the material, merges the past with the present and helps it learn to walk unaided. You can picture the black and white, grainy shadows flitting over the screen. The music is mysterious and shady, but never completely dark. A couple of lamps hover over the music, but the light is intermittent and dull. It is the light of the last century, old and weak. At the same time, the re-imagining has renewed the light, so we’re left with something from the past that continues to haunt and influence the present day. Experimental tones and harder, electronic manipulations explode in powerful jets of monochromatic light.

The film itself takes place two years after the death of Christine Faber’s husband. One night, she thinks she hears him calling out from the surf on the beach. Later on, she meets a tall dark stranger named Alexis, and he seems to know all about her life. Like the stranger in the film, the music casts a long, mysterious shadow, and it never completely escapes the complexity of the dark.